Clinton Got Nearly 2 Million More Votes Than Trump

Hillary Clinton's popular vote lead over president-elect Donald Trump is close to 2 million, but it doesn't matter because she lost the electoral college vote.

Votes are still being counted, but so far Clinton has won a total of 63,649,978 votes, while Trump won 61,943,670, according to the Cook Political Report.

Clinton's lead has been helped by a voting surge in California, where she has accumulated nearly 7.5 million votes, compared to Trump's nearly 4 million votes. Clinton's lead there is a 5.9 percent improvement over Democrats' 2012 showing.

But Clinton lost several of the Rust Belt states that Democrats had won for several elections in a row by getting a far less percentage of the votes President Barack Obama won in 2012.

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In Wisconsin, a state that Clinton was so sure she would win that she didn't even bother campaigning there during the general election, the Democratic shift compared to 2012 was -7.9 percent, according to the Cook Political Report.

In Pennsylvania, it was -6.5 percent. And in Michigan, the negative Democratic shift was a whopping -9.5 percent.

Trump downplayed the importance of the popular vote by saying he would have won it if he was aiming for that result.

“If the election were based on total popular vote, I would have campaigned in N.Y., Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily,” he wrote on Twitter, according to Politico.

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But in 2012, Trump vehemently criticized the popular vote when he incorrectly stated that then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney won the popular vote but lost the election because of the electoral college.

“He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!” Trump wrote, adding: "the electoral college is a disaster for a democracy."